Freud - Complete Works (557 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   Think of our first
patient’s obsessional action. The woman was without her
husband, whom she loved intensely but with whom she could not share
her life on account of his deficiencies and weaknesses. She had to
remain faithful to him; she could not put anyone else in his place.
Her obsessional symptom gave her what she longed for, set her
husband on a pedestal, denied and corrected his weaknesses and
above all his impotence. This symptom was fundamentally a
wish-fulfilment, just like a dream-and moreover, what is not always
true of a dream, an
erotic
wish-fulfilment. In the case of
our second patient you could at least gather that her ceremonial
sought to obstruct intercourse between her parents or prevent it
from producing a new baby. You will also probably have guessed that
it was at bottom endeavouring to put her herself in her
mother’s place. Once again, therefore, a setting-aside of
interferences with sexual satisfaction and a fulfilment of the
patient’s own sexual wishes. I shall soon come to the
complication I have hinted at.

   I should like to anticipate,
Gentlemen, the qualifications which I shall have to make later in
the universal validity of these statements. I will therefore point
out to you that all I have said here about repression and the
formation and meaning of symptoms was derived from three forms of
neurosis - anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria and obsessional
neurosis - and that in the first instance it is also valid only for
these forms. These three disorders, which we are accustomed to
group together as ‘
transference neuroses
’, also
circumscribe the region in which psycho-analytic therapy can
function. The other neuroses have been far less thoroughly studied
by psycho-analysis; in one group of them the impossibility of
therapeutic influence has been a reason for this neglect. Nor
should you forget that psycho-analysis is still a very young
science, that preparing for it costs much trouble and time, and
that not at all long ago it was being practised single-handed.
Nevertheless, we are every where on the point of penetrating to an
understanding of these other disorders which are not transference
neuroses. I hope later to be able to introduce you to the
extensions of our hypotheses and findings which result from
adaptation to this new material, and to show you that these further
studies have not led to contradictions but to the establishment of
higher unities. If, then, everything I am saying here applies to
the transference neuroses, let me first increase the value of
symptoms by a new piece of information. For a comparative study of
the determining causes of falling ill leads to a result which can
be expressed in a formula: these people fall ill in one way or
another of
frustration
, when reality prevents them from
satisfying their sexual wishes. You see how excellently these two
findings tally with each other. It is only thus that symptoms can
be properly viewed as substitutive satisfactions for what is missed
in life.

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   No doubt all kinds of objections
can still be raised to the assertion that neurotic symptoms are
substitutes for sexual satisfactions. I will mention two of them
to-day. When you yourselves have carried out analytic examinations
of a considerable number of neurotics, you will perhaps tell me,
shaking your head, that in a lot of cases my assertion is simply
not true; the symptoms seem rather to have the contrary purpose of
excluding or of stopping sexual satisfaction. I will not dispute
the correctness of your interpretation. The facts in
psycho-analysis have a habit of being rather more complicated than
we like. If they were as simple as all that, perhaps it might not
have needed psycho-analysis to bring them to light. Indeed, some of
the features of our second patient’s ceremonial show signs of
this ascetic character with its hostility to sexual satisfaction:
when, for instance, she got rid of the clocks and watches, which
had the magical meaning of avoiding erections during the night, or
when she tried to guard against flower-pots falling and breaking,
which was equivalent to protecting her virginity. In some other
cases of bed ceremonials, which I have been able to analyse, this
negative character was far more outspoken; the ceremonial might
consist exclusively of defensive measures against sexual memories
and temptations. However, we have already found often enough that
in psycho-analysis opposites imply no contradiction. We might
extend our thesis and say that symptoms aim either at a sexual
satisfaction or at fending it off, and that on the whole the
positive, wish-fulfilling character prevails in hysteria and the
negative, ascetic one in obsessional neurosis. If symptoms can
serve the purpose both of sexual satisfaction and of its opposite,
there is an excellent basis for this double-sidedness or polarity
in a part of their mechanism which I have so far not been able to
mention. For, as we shall hear, they are the products of a
compromise and arise from the mutual interference between two
opposing currents; they represent not only the repressed but also
the repressing force which had a share in their origin. One side or
the other may be more strongly represented; but it is rarely that
one influence is entirely absent. In hysteria a convergence of both
intentions in the same symptom is usually achieved. In obsessional
neurosis the two portions are often separated; the symptom then
becomes diphasic and consists in two actions, one after the other,
which cancel each other out.

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   We shall not be able to dismiss a
second objection so easily. If you survey a fairly long series of
interpretations of symptoms, you will probably start by judging
that the concept of a substitutive sexual satisfaction has been
stretched to its extreme limits in them. You will not fail to
emphasize the fact that these symptoms offer nothing real in the
way of satisfaction, that often enough they are restricted to the
revival of a sensation or the representation of a phantasy derived
from a sexual complex. And you will further point out that these
supposed sexual satisfactions often take on a childish and
discreditable form, approximate to an act of masturbation perhaps,
or recall dirty kinds of naughtiness which are forbidden even to
children - habits of which they have been broken. And, going on
from this, you will also express surprise that we are representing
as a sexual satisfaction what would rather have to be described as
the satisfaction of lusts that are cruel or horrible or would even
have to be called unnatural. We shall come to no agreement,
Gentlemen, on this latter point till we have made a thorough
investigation of the sexual life of human beings and till, in doing
so, we have decided what it is that we are justified in calling
‘sexual’.

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LECTURE XX

THE
SEXUAL LIFE OF HUMAN BEINGS

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - One would certainly have supposed that there
could be no doubt as to what is to be understood by
‘sexual’. First and foremost, what is sexual is
something improper, something one ought not to talk about. I have
been told that the pupils of a celebrated psychiatrist made an
attempt once to convince their teacher of how frequently the
symptoms of hysterical patients represent sexual things. For this
purpose they took him to the bedside of a female hysteric, whose
attacks were an unmistakable imitation of the process of
childbirth. But with a shake of his head he remarked: ‘Well,
there’s nothing sexual about childbirth.’ Quite right.
Childbirth need not in every case be something improper.

   I see that you take offence at my
joking about such serious things. But it is not altogether a joke.
Seriously, it is not easy to decide what is covered by the concept
‘sexual’. Perhaps the only suitable definition would be
‘everything that is related to the distinction between the
two sexes’. But you will regard that as colourless and too
comprehensive. If you take the fact of the sexual act as the
central point, you will perhaps define as sexual everything which,
with a view to obtaining pleasure, is concerned with the body, and
in particular with the sexual organs, of someone of the opposite
sex, and which in the last resort aims at the union of the genitals
and the performance of the sexual act. But if so you will really
not be very far from the equation of what is sexual with what is
improper, and childbirth will really not be anything sexual. If, on
the other hand, you take the reproductive function as the nucleus
of sexuality, you risk excluding a whole number of things which are
not aimed at reproduction but which are certainly sexual, such as
masturbation and perhaps even kissing. But we are already prepared
to find that attempts at a definition always lead to difficulties;
so let us renounce the idea of doing better in this particular
case. We may suspect that in the course of the development of the
concept ‘sexual’ something has happened which has
resulted in what Silberer has aptly called an ‘error of
superimposition’.

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   On the whole, indeed, when we
come to think of it, we are not quite at a loss in regard to what
it is that people call sexual. Something which combines a reference
to the contrast between the sexes, to the search for pleasure, to
the reproductive function and to the characteristic of something
that is improper and must be kept secret - some such combination
will serve for all practical purposes in everyday life. But for
science that is not enough. By means of careful investigations
(only made possible, indeed, by disinterested self-discipline) we
have come to know groups of individuals whose ‘sexual
life’ deviates in the most striking way from the usual
picture of the average. Some of these ‘perverse’ people
have, we might say, struck the distinction between the sexes off
their programme. Only members of their own sex can rouse their
sexual wishes; those of the other sex, and especially their sexual
parts, are not a sexual object for them at all, and in extreme
cases are an object of disgust. This implies, of course, that they
have abandoned any share in reproduction. We call such people
homosexuals or inverts. They are men and women who are often,
though not always, irreproachably fashioned in other respects, of
high intellectual and ethical development, the victims only of this
one fatal deviation. Through the mouth of their scientific
spokesmen they represent themselves as a special variety of the
human species - a ‘third sex’ which has a right to
stand on an equal rooting beside the other two. We shall perhaps
have an opportunity of examining their claims critically. Of course
they are not, as they also like to assert, an
‘
elite
’ of mankind; there are at least as many
inferior and useless individuals among them as there are among
those of a different sexual kind.

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   This class of perverts at any
rate behave to their sexual objects in approximately the same way
as normal people do to theirs. But we now come to a long series of
abnormal people whose sexual activity diverges more and more widely
from what seems desirable to a sensible person. In their
multiplicity and strangeness they can only be compared to the
grotesque monsters painted by Breughel for the temptation of St.
Anthony or to the long procession of vanished gods and believers
which Flaubert heads past, before the eyes of his pious penitent.
Such a medley calls for some kind of arrangement if it is not to
confuse our senses. We accordingly divide them into those in whom,
like the homosexuals, the sexual
object
has been changed,
and others in whom the sexual
aim
is what has primarily been
altered. The first group includes those who have renounced the
union of the two genitals and who replace the genitals of one of
the couple engaged in the sexual act by some other part or region
of the body; in this they disregard the lack of suitable organic
arrangements as well as any impediment offered by feelings of
disgust. (They replace the vulva, for instance, by the mouth or
anus.) Others follow, who, it is true, still retain the genitals as
an object - not, however, on account of their sexual function but
of other functions in which the genital plays a part either for
anatomical reasons or because of its propinquity. We find from them
that the excretory functions, which have been put aside as improper
during the upbringing of children, retain the ability to attract
the whole of sexual interest. Then come others again, who have
abandoned the genital as an object altogether, and have taken some
other part of the body as the object they desire - a woman’s
breast, a foot or a plait of hair. After them come others for whom
parts of the body are of no importance but whose every wish is
satisfied by a piece of clothing, a shoe, a piece of underclothing
- the fetishists. Later in the procession come people who require
the whole object indeed, but make quite definite demands of it -
strange or horrible - even that it must have become a defenceless
corpse, and who, using criminal violence, make it into one so that
they may enjoy it. But enough of this kind of horror!

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   The second group is led by
perverts who have made what is normally only an introductory or
preparatory act into the aim of their sexual wishes. They are
people whose desire it is to look at the other person or to feel
him or to watch him in the performance of his intimate actions, or
who expose parts of their own bodies which should be covered, in
the obscure expectation that they may be rewarded by a
corresponding action in return. Next come the sadists, puzzling
people whose tender endeavours have no other aim than to cause pain
and torment to their object, ranging from humiliation to severe
physical injuries; and, as though to counterbalance them, their
counterparts, the masochists, whose only pleasure it is to suffer
humiliations and torments of every kind from their loved object
either symbolically or in reality. There are still others in whom
several of these abnormal preconditions are united and intertwined;
and lastly, we must learn that each of these groups is to be found
in two forms: alongside of those who seek their sexual satisfaction
in reality are those who are content merely to
imagine
that
satisfaction, who need no real object at all, but can replace it by
their phantasies.